I am very selective of my worlds, I don't want to rush around stopping Pirate raids, only if it already hs Pink, blue or purple spice, or can help me annex enemy empires. I have about 24 stars, but as far as uplifted species, I have about 74. 60 uplifted creatures, all of them vassels, I got Diplomat easily. The best part is that I can attack one without any of the others caring, so if one is a Spode loving bastard, I can just demolish them and replace them with a "Healthy" race. All of my 14 colonies are T3/T2.

My largest empire had 59 Star Systems towards the Golden age. The empire was a long string of planets stretched up the galactic arm like a galactic highway. The stars are spaced at the max distance of the jump drives allowance at the time. So the beginning planets are closer together on the string closer to the home planet and very far apart at the end.

Eventually the empire reached the end of the arm. A which point the Grox attacked my home planet and I had to turn my eyes towards the galactic core. A set of shield planets were built to hold off the grox and eventually the galactic highway was left neglected and just the bare minimum of planets were left colonized to reach the end of the arm. Then eventually the empire all but collapsed when the grox broke the sheild planets.

This opened the Third Empires era. At this point the homeworld which was defended with religious fervour collapsed under the weight of the war and the citizens fled to the last planet at the end of the arm and they are now rebuilding there homeworld carefully mimicking there ecology on a terraformed world. Ironically it took me almost 3 days to find a world with the right conditions and crystal formations. Which would count as this species dark ages. They now have a healthy galactic empire of 23 planets with a new galactic highway which goes left to right in a toroid pattern around the galaxy. Plans to build inwards with spoke like inroads are planned.